He motioned towards a chair with the barrel of his .45. 'Now suppose you just sit down, son, an' tell your daddy what goes on.'
The Saint sat down.
'If you don't mind my mentioning it again,' he remarked, 'you seem to bob up pretty frequently yourself.'
'I git paid for that by the country. But I shuah never worked so much overtime before until you hit the town.' The grey eyes were placid but bright as flints in their creased sockets. 'I been mighty tolerant with you, son, on account of you bein' a guest of the city, so to speak. But you don't want to forget that we ain't like Scotland Yard. They tell me they ask all their questions with powder puffs, over there, but out here we get kinda rough an hasty, sometimes, when our patience is plumb wore out.'
It seemed as if there were only the two of them in the room. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, fixed in their arm-lifted pose with the petrifaction of rigor mortis, made no more difference than a pair of statues. But the most perplexing nonentity was Jesse Rogers. He had never moved or spoken, but his half-closed eyes behind the rimless glasses had not shifted once from the Saint's face.
'You can smoke, if you like,' Haskins went on. 'But be almighty shuah it's tobacco you're reachin' for.' He watched the Saint kindle a cigarette and put his lighter away. 'You didn't by any chance come in heah lookin' for a lad named Jesse Rogers, did you?'
'You knew that.'
'Shuah. You told me this afternoon. Now, I heard tell you was a smart boy, son, an' comin' to a feller's dressin' room to bump him off after the whole countryside knows you been chasin' him all day strikes me as a right foolish way of committin' murder. So I just can't see that you was aimin' to do that.'
Simon stretched out his long legs and blew smoke towards the ceiling.
'That's very kind of you, Sheriff.'
'Way down in my heart,' Haskins declared dryly, 'I'm a soft, lovin' sort of man.' His gaze brushed over the Saint's dinner clothes. 'So you hadn't no idea of killin' Jesse. At least, not right now. You dolled yourself all up an' just come out here on a party, like. You wouldn't by any chance have brought along that red-headed girl?'
'As a matter of fact,' said the Saint blandly, 'I did.'
'You've got the ball now, son,' Haskins said. 'Keep goin'.'
Simon's mind raced warily ahead, trying to cover all the conceivable ramifications of possibility. And yet he couldn't find a single one which seemed to take a dangerous direction. That was the fantastic part of it. For once in his life, he could face any inquisition without a shadow on his conscience. And in that fact alone there was something more disconcerting than there would have been in any need for lies. Subterfuge and evasion were things that one expected in such adventures with the regularity of treads on a tractor. But Haskins was interested in nothing that the Saint had to conceal. The Saint's only secrets were the lifebelt twisted on to the wrist of the drowned boy, the planting of the body on the March Hare, the interview that had followed, and a brief glimpse of a submerging submarine. And Haskins knew nothing about any of those things-even the opposition had co-operated in concealing some of them. The only things that Haskins was concerned with could be dissected under arc lights without any fear that Simon could anticipate. There was no problem of inventing a convincing lie. There was only the much more devastating problem of making the truth believable. 'I haven't one single thing to hide,' said the Saint, who was obsessed with the hollowness of his own candour even while he said it. 'You know just as much as I do-unless you know any more.'
'Don't stop, son.'
The Saint pulled at his cigarette, marshalling the simple facts. When there was no obvious direction for a lie, what could be safer than the naked truth?
'You know why I'm in Miami. Gilbeck sent for me. I showed you his daughter's letter. I don't know one single thing more than what was in it, about what the trouble was. Now the Gilbecks have disappeared, and naturally I'm afraid there's dirty work in it. Naturally, too, I want to find them. But I didn't know where to begin.'
'You made a good start, anyhow.'
'Somebody else made the start-somebody who knew I was looking for them. Jennet shot at me. We caught him and grilled him-maybe that was overstepping the technicalities a bit, but I told you we'd done it. He told us he'd been coerced by Rogers, whom he didn't know anything about except that he'd met him on that barge of Gallipolis's. So I went out there, and that's where you met us again. I told you the story then. But Gallipolis had already told me that Rogers worked here, which he didn't tell you. So I came here.'
'So you an' Gallipolis was holdin' out on me.' The Sheriffs voice was gentle and chiding. 'Well . . .'
'Gallipolis is a bit prejudiced against the Law,' said the Saint, with a slight smile. 'Personally, I didn't give it a thought. I like taking care of myself. Besides, I've found that my motives are sometimes misunderstood when I try to interest the Law in my troubles.'
'Mebbe that's so.'
'Look,' Simon insisted, 'how hard did you try to give me the benefit of the doubt when you found that note of mine on the Mirage? Not any longer than it took you to get out to Gilbeck's and start calling me names-'
'Just a minute, son.' Haskins elongated his neck a couple of inches. 'Who told you that was where I found that note?'
The Saint sighed out a steady feather of smoke.
'Probably,' he said, without batting an eyelid, 'the same mysterious person who tipped you off that the Mirage was at Wildcat Key.'
It was not such a wild shot in the dark, after all. The Sheriff blinked a little, and then found dogged consolation in his chew.
'Son,' he remarked, 'I don't mind tellin' you I've been get-tin' a mite tired of bein' called to the phone to receive messages from a voice belongin' to A Friend. First thing it was a drowned sailor on the March Hare. Then it was to look for the Mirage at Wildcat Key. Then it was to see what you were doin' with Gallipolis on his barge, takin' an escaped convict there. Tonight it was Jesse Rogers.'
'You mean he called you?' Simon took another puzzled glance at the recumbent figure on the divan.
'That's right, son,' Haskins replied unexpectedly. 'But A Friend called him first. A Friend told him the jig was up an' there was a long box waitin' for him tonight. So he called me. That warn't much more 'n an hour ago. So I come out. I tramp across country an' let myself in the back, rememberin' about you an' not wantin' to spoil anythin'. Jesse an' me kind of got together. So when he went on, I hid me in the closet.'
The Saint's brows were beginning to draw imperceptibly together.
'What for?'
'For Hans an' Fritz heah.' Haskins shifted his cud from one side of his mouth to the other and gave the first side a rest 'It seems like your smartness sort of slipped a cog, son. If I hadn't 'a' done that, an' taken those fancy shootin' irons away from 'em when they come in-the way we figgered it, you an' Jesse, or what was left o' you, would be lyin' on the floor waitin' for the coroner.'
Simon looked at the two guns on the dressing table again, and at Tweedledum and Tweedledee again, and at Jesse Rogers again, and felt as if he was balanced on a pinnacle of crumbling ice above an interplanetary maelstrom of emptiness.
'You've taken the ball again,' he said. 'It's all yours. Now you keep going.'
'It was a mighty clever idea, accordin' to Jesse's tip from A Friend an' the way we worked it out,' Haskins proceeded luxuriously. 'After Jesse had done his act, he got a message that you wanted to see him-'
'Wait,' Simon interrupted. 'I hadn't got as far as that. He beat me to it. I got a message that he wanted to see me.'
Haskins barely twitched one shaggy eyebrow.
'That's what the waiter told him, anyhow. I don't misbelieve you, son. Mebbe the waiter was just doin' his part. It don't make no difference. One way or another, you get here. An' when you walk in the door, like you did just now, Hans an' Fritz are already holdin' Rogers up. Hans will shoot you with the Magnum, while Fritz shoots Jesse with that British gun. Then they leave the right guns beside each o' you, an' duck out the window. When everybody comes rushin' in, it looks just like you'd killed each other in a gun fight-particularly since about four people know that you've been trailin' Jesse all day with a grudge agin him on account of he hired Lafe Jennet to take a shot at you. Havin' come in on some o' that myself this afternoon, I'd 'a' been most liable to figger that was the way of it myself.' The Sheriff scratched one leg with the toe of the opposite boot. 'Thinkin' it all over, son, it shuah seems to
